What would the Community think?

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that making great television over the course of multiple seasons might be the most challenging of all sustained creative acts. On a practical level, it’s arguably harder than directing a movie or writing a novel, not just because of the scale and speed required, but because of the uncertainty inherent in network scheduling, in which a show’s creator doesn’t know whether he’ll have one episode, half a season, or six seasons and a movie. Few series have suffered from more uncertainty than Dan Harmon’s Community, which, despite a vocal fan following, has always seemed on the verge of cancellation. Its return is therefore all the more cause for celebration, not simply because the show survived, but because it thrived under awful circumstances: no other contemporary series, not even Mad Men, has faced the vagaries of modern television as well as Community, which has pushed the boundaries of the sitcom in every episode while somehow adding up to a satisfying whole. The result is a master class in both comedy and storytelling.

When I think of Community, the first word that comes to mind is balance. This may seem surprising, given some of the truly unhinged episodes that the show has produced over the past few years, but what really stands out with this series is its ability to coordinate a wide range of impulses and ambitions—any one of which, left unchecked, would lead to disaster—within one remarkably cohesive vision. It’s a fantastically structured and plotted show that also leaves room for its characters to evolve through improvisation. It’s breathtakingly smart and honestly emotional. It’s a whirlwind history of recent pop culture (the second season is the first thing I’d throw into a time capsule to give future generations a sense of what this decade was like) and also fundamentally grounded in the lives of its seven major characters. And like Glee, it began with a cast meant to evoke sitcom stereotypes and then gradually reveal greater depths, but unlike Glee, it succeeded.

The comparison with Glee, which I’m not the first to make—Todd VanDerWerff of the A.V. Club has set it out admirably—is perhaps the most instructive. From its first episodes on, Glee was manifestly a show of vast ambition but limited ability to realize its goals. Community, by contrast, has aimed even higher and nailed every challenge it set for itself. And its ambitions have only grown over time. This was a smart, funny show right out of the gate, but it wasn’t until late in the first season that it locked on to its true potential. Part of this was its discovery of the range of things it could do, from tightly written bottle episodes to fake clip shows to epic parodies of action and science fiction movies, but it also involved refining the characters to take advantage of the strengths of its cast, particularly the astonishing triumvirate of Donald Glover, Danny Pudi, and Gillian Jacobs. (Jacobs, in particular, has been a revelation in the second half of the show’s run, as Britta evolved from a bland voice of reason to a glorious train wreck of a human being.)

Above all else, Community reminds us how to be clever. I’ve written at length about the perils of cleverness, and there are certainly critics who see the show as nothing more than a cleverness machine, churning out movie references and pastiches for its tiny audience. Yet the show’s real cleverness doesn’t lie in its inside jokes and nerd-culture homages—otherwise, it would be little more than a more cuddly version of Family Guy—but in its ability to integrate them into a world that feels emotional and real. Greendale is one of those fictional places in which we want to believe, populated by characters who feel like our friends, and whose lives and problems remain consistent even as they’re fighting zombies or split into alternate timelines. That’s more than clever; it’s astounding. My favorite episode consists of nothing but the characters talking around a table for twenty minutes, but it works because they’re doing exactly what the show does every week: telling stories. And it does it as well as any show I’ve ever seen.